Increase Your Punching Power With This Drill!
Boxing is a sport which requires extreme amounts of endurance, when it comes to adding power to your punches, you cannot just go to the gym and lift heavy weights or add on 10lbs and then return to the ring and think you can hit harder. primarily because the majority of boxers are not heavyweights, they have to stay in a weight class, this means we have to figure out ways to increase punching power without adding on any weight.
Of course there is the small matter of technique, as always ensure your punching technique is correct before you look at ways to increase power because good technique means you will not only punch harder but punch faster too. Assuming your technique is good I am going to outline one of the drills I use with my guys which helps to increase punching power and explosiveness.
Speed training and plyometrics make perfect tools for increasing your punch power. In this drill we are going to take two movements and combine them into a short but hard workout. I use these at the end of my sessions, sometimes even after suicide sprints – just to make sure I wipe my guys out…..
The first movement I begin with is the plyo push up. This is great for explosive training, working the fast twitch muscle fibres so we can explode into punches and get some power added on. To perform these simply get into the push up position, go slowly on the way down and then quickly explode on the way up.
The second movement we will use is going to be the broad jump – also known as the long jump. I love jumping exercises for boxing because it closely mimics the movements we make when throwing power punches, a great example would be the lead left hook. There is a direct correlation between your jumping ability and your ability to hit hard. So by training our jumping ability, we are also learning to produce lower limb explosiveness which will help us punch harder.
For the broad jump we will take off using both feet together and land both feet together too. Swinging of the arms and bending of the knees is used to produce the forward drive.
Set a distance for the drill, I tend to use 30-40m. Then decide how many plyo push ups and broad jumps you want to do, for the first time I would suggest using one plyo push up followed by one broad jump until they have completed the 40m. Once you have adapted to this drill, you can increase the number of plyo push ups to two, then 3, 4, 5 and so on followed by one broad jump. Again as you progress you can also add to the number of broad jumps used or increase the distance, as you can see you can be very flexible with this drill by adding reps or increasing the distance.
Here is a video of my guys doing this drill at the end of one of our sessions to give you an idea of how it is performed…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZclbuRKVk8